In the spring of 1981, John Anderson released “I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal (But I’m Gonna Be a Diamond Someday).” It climbed to No. 4 on the Billboard country chart and earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Male Country Vocal Performance. On the radio it sounded like a grin, a man promising to polish up his rough edges one day at a time. But the man who wrote it, Billy Joe Shaver, started it on his knees at the edge of a cliff, in the middle of the night, not sure he would walk back down.
A songwriter with money and nothing left
By the 1970s, Billy Joe Shaver was one of the most respected writers in Nashville. Waylon Jennings had built his 1973 album Honky Tonk Heroes almost entirely out of Shaver songs. The checks were coming in.
Shaver was honest later about where that money went. In a 1994 interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, he said the income simply kept him supplied with the alcohol and drugs that were killing him. He called himself the king of sinners. He had not written a song in a long time, and he said he struggled just to put a sentence together.
The cost was at home, too. His only son, Eddy, had lost respect for him. Shaver never pretended otherwise.
The vision and the drive in the dark
The turning point, Shaver said, came one night when he saw Jesus sitting on the end of his bed, shaking his head at him.
He got in his vehicle and drove out to a place he knew at the Narrows of the Harpeth River, near Kingston Springs, Tennessee, west of Nashville. A treacherous path leads up to the top of a bluff there. Shaver described rock formations up top that wind and rain had worn into shapes like altars, with the biggest one sitting right on the edge of the cliff.
He climbed that path in the dark. He told Fresh Air he had gone up there having decided that something was going to end that night, one way or another. Years later, he told an interviewer simply that he had been about to die.
“I found myself on my knees right there at the edge of that cliff.”
With his head in his hands, Billy Joe Shaver asked God to forgive him and asked the Lord to help him. He said a lot happened up there that would take too long to explain. What he did explain was the walk back down.
Half a song by the bottom of the trail
Shaver came down that path at about four in the morning, singing. By the time he reached the end of the trail, the whole first half of the song was written. It was a prayer dressed up as an easygoing country song: a rough, ordinary lump of a man asking to be pressed into something better, and promising to stay humble along the way.
The second half did not come so easily. Shaver said it took him about six more months to finish it.
He did not usually give God credit for his songwriting. In one interview he said he didn’t believe God helps anybody write songs, then made a single exception. This was the one.
From one singer to the next
Other artists picked it up. Johnny Cash recorded it in 1978. Shaver cut it himself as the title track of his 1981 Columbia album. But it was a young Florida singer with a voice full of bends and twang who turned it into a hit.
John Anderson released his version on March 28, 1981, as the first single from his album John Anderson 2, produced by Norro Wilson. It reached No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart and brought Anderson his Grammy nomination.
What Johnny Cash told him
Of everything that happened to the song, the moment that hit Shaver hardest came from Johnny Cash. Cash told him that while he was in rehab, he sang “Old Chunk of Coal” to himself every morning.
Shaver wrote about it in his memoir, and when Terry Gross brought it up in 2005, he admitted he had to hang up the phone when Cash told him, because he started crying. He called it the greatest compliment he ever received.
A song written by one man trying to climb out of the hole had become a morning prayer for another.
The long walk back
The song did not fix everything overnight, and Shaver never claimed it did. He told Fresh Air that it took a long time to win back the respect of the people he loved. But his son Eddy came back to him and played guitar beside him on stage for years.
Billy Joe Shaver died on October 28, 2020, at 81. John Anderson, inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2024, has never let the song go. When he sang it at the Hall of Fame’s CMA Theater in 2019, one reviewer noted that a song that once sounded like a promise now sounded like the truth.
Do you remember the first time you heard John Anderson sing this one? Was it on the radio, at a dance, or in somebody’s pickup? We would love to hear your memory.